Reading Ulysses at the Martello Tower by Chris Hedges

 

Dublin: It is a blustery, overcast morning on the Irish coast. I am standing on the roof of the Martello Tower, looking down at bathers diving from a rock into the Forty Foot in Dublin Bay on the beach at Sandycove. I hold James Joyce’s “Ulysses.”

With nothing but the wind to disturb me, I open the book. I read the first chapter, which Joyce — who lived briefly in this decommissioned coastal fortification — set in the tower”

“Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came down from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which a mirror and a razor lay crossed,” I read. “A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned: Introibo ad altare Dei.”

The Latin translation is “I will go in to the altar of God,” the opening of Mass in the Catholic Church for centuries.

There is the stench of corruption in the opening chapter, with Mulligan intoning a dark Mass to Stephen Dedalus, who has spurned his mother’s request to pray at her deathbed. Dedalus, cast out from his father’s house, is soon exiled from the tower to wander Dublin. His refusal to bow before authority, whether embodied in the Roman Catholic Church or the British colonizers, makes him an outcast, like the novel’s protagonist, Leopold Bloom.

We too are being orphaned in our own land.

I cope with the savagery around me by reading. I retreat into past worlds and past lives. I revel in the lyricism and musicality of great writing. I heed the wisdom of our ancestors.

Joyce detests what we should all detest. War. Violence. Nationalism, including Irish nationalism. Grasping capitalists. Fatuous pundits and journalists. Pseudo-intellectuals. Utopian dreamers. Pompous politicians. Bullies and brutes. He distrusts causes and noble ideals. 

Joyce knows the more inflated the rhetoric — “the big words that make us so unhappy,” as Dedalus says in the novel — the more the demand for human sacrifice. He chronicles the foibles, idiosyncrasies and struggles that define our lives. Like V. S. Pritchett — another writer I love — he reminds us that no one is ordinary.

Joyce’s heroes do not adorn recruitment posters enticing young men to fight in the suicidal folly of World War I, underway when he wrote much of the novel. Bloom’s bodily functions, including defecation and masturbation, are described in detail, scenes that led to the book being banned for obscenity in the United States and Britain and in the Soviet Union for “not conforming to the policy of socialist realism.”

But the point was to bring Bloom down to earth. Bloom is unmistakably human, yet filled with pathos, empathy and a desperate yearning for love. Heroism, Joyce shows us, is defined by the ability to endure suffering, rather than inflict it.

There is much in this world, from the genocide in Gaza to the consolidation of fascism in the U.S., which warrants despair. But when it becomes overwhelming, there is the reassuring comfort of novels like “Ulysses,” which is set on one day, June 16, 1904. It improbably casts a Jewish advertising salesman as a hero, as a modern Odysseus, struggling to hold on to goodness and kindness in a world where the cruel and heartless triumph.

The vulgar, such as the cad and womanizer Blazes Boylan in the novel — like Donald Trump — lack Bloom’s capacity for introspection. Words, for them, conceal more than they reveal. Joyce’s characters are portrayed with all our human complexity, ambiguity and inconsistency. They struggle with the contradictory and warring fragments of human nature — our plurality of identities.

Joyce, who lived in self-imposed exile in Paris, did not socialize with the literary grandees and fashionable denizens who congregated in the exclusive Faubourg Saint-Germain salons. His intimate circle encompassed waiters, fruit vendors, bank clerks and hotel concierges. The salons entranced Marcel Proust until Proust confronted their cruelty and hypocrisy in the final volume of “In Search of Lost Time.”

Joyce had little time for the bookish, the pretentious and pedants. At a dinner in Paris, to the consternation of the hosts, he chatted with Proust not about modernism and literature, but their physical ailments and shared fondness for dark chocolate truffles.

Proust, Joyce recalled, “would only talk about duchesses, while I was more concerned with their chambermaids.”

Marxist critics, like many of Joyce’s contemporaries, recoiled at his depiction of our irrevocably flawed human nature and his disdain for the myth of human progress. For Joyce, we are not headed toward a classless utopia, or any utopia.

“I don’t know why they attack me,” Joyce said to his friend Eugene Jolas. “Nobody in any of my books is worth more than a thousand pounds.”

He understood that national myths are used to obscure our looming mortality, to create meaning out of chaos and to fool us into thinking we are bigger than ourselves. Joyce revels in the messiness of life, puncturing our self-delusions and the ways we present ourselves to the world. He obliterates the fatuous binary narratives we spin out in the name of conventional morality.

“If we go to him thinking he may be the apostle of brotherhood, he shows us brothers in violent quarrel,” Richard Ellmann writes in his biography of Joyce. “If we go to him to find a defender of the family, he presents his central hero — the cuckold. If we ask him to be the celebrant of the isolated individual, Joyce shows isolation making him morose and defenseless. If we look for the spokesman of life, he introduces us to the dead.”

Late in the afternoon, rain clouds lowering overhead, I go to Glasnevin Cemetery in Dublin to see the graves of famous revolutionaries, including Roger Casement. Casement, who exposed Belgian atrocities in the Congo, was a fierce opponent of the British Empire, which Dedalus sums up as composed of “beer, beef, business, bibles, bulldogs, battleships, buggery and bishops.”

Casement was originally buried on the grounds of Pentonville Prison in London, where he was hanged for treason after attempting to smuggle 20,000 Mosin-Nagant 1891 rifles, along with machine guns and millions of rounds of ammunition from Germany to arm Irish nationalists in the ill-fated 1916 uprising. His body was repatriated to Ireland in 1965, where he lay in state in Dublin for five days and received a full state funeral with military honors.

I stand before the graves of the Irish revolutionaries Michael Collins and Countess Constance Markievicz. I peer up at the 180-foot granite tower marking the tomb of Daniel O’Connell, the 19th-century nationalist leader. I stop at the grave of Maud Gonne, the actress and activist who the poet William Butler Yeats compared to Helen of Troy and who spurned his numerous marriage proposals.

“I have spread my dreams under your feet,” Yeats writes. “Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.”

Joyce models the chapters in his book on the episodes in “The Odyssey,” but his intentions diverge radically from Homer. Homer celebrates the military prowess and martial feats Joyce despises. Critics have busied themselves, and wasted our time, scouring “Ulysses” and Homer for parallels, mistaking Joyce’s superstructure for Joyce’s vision.

Joyce sets chapter six in this 124-acre graveyard that now holds 1.5 million souls. Odysseus in “The Odyssey” descends to Hades to meet the prophet Tiresias to discover how he can return to Ithaca. In Joyce’s hands, Hades does not conjure up spirits or prophecies but the awful finality of death.

Bloom attends the funeral in the cemetery for the drunkard Paddy Dignam. Bloom mourns the loss of his son, Rudy, who died 11 days after his birth a decade earlier. He envisions him as a young boy in an Eton suit. He remembers his father, who killed himself by drinking poison and, in his suicide note, begged Bloom to take care of his dog Athos. He struggles with the knowledge that in the afternoon his wife, Molly, has a rendezvous with her lover, Blazes Boylan. He endures the antisemitic slights of his fellow mourners. He looks at the plot where Rudy and his mother are buried and imagines his own burial.

He surveys the acres of tombs around him with their “saddened angles, crosses, broken pillars, family vaults, stone hopes praying with upcast eyes.” “How many!” he says. “All these here once walked round Dublin. Faithful departed. As you are now so once were we.” He watches the cemetery caretaker in a “well cut frock coat” who he suspects is weighing up the mourners “to see which will go next.”

“Well it is a long rest,” he thinks of those buried around him. “Feel no more. It’s the moment you feel. Must be damned unpleasant. Can’t believe it at first. Mistake must be: someone else. Try the house opposite. Wait, I wanted to. I haven’t yet. Then darkened death chamber. Light they want. Whispering around you. Would you like to see a priest?

“Then rambling and wandering. Delirium all you hid all your life. The death struggle. His sleep is not natural. Press his lower eyelid. Watching his nose pointed is his jaw sinking are the soles of his feet yellow. Pull the pillow away and finish it off on the floor since he’s doomed. Devil in that picture of sinner’s death showing him a woman. Dying to embrace her in his shirt. Last act of Lucia. Shall I nevermore behold thee? Bam! Expires. Gone at last. People talk about you a bit: forget you. Don’t forget to pray for him. Remember him in your prayers. Even Parnell. Ivy day dying out. Then they follow: dropping into a hole one after the other.”

He sees “an obese grey rat” along the side of a crypt and thinks, “one of those chaps would make short work of a fellow. Pick his bones clean no matter who it was… Wonder does the news go about whenever a fresh one is let down. Underground communication. We learned that from them. Wouldn’t be surprised. Regular square feed for them. Flies come before he’s well dead. Got wind of Dignam. They wouldn’t care about the smell of it.”

There are sections of “Ulysses” that should be read out loud. Joyce wrote about Dublin’s red-light district, Night town, as if it were a play. 

The characters’ names are set off in capital letters and there are italicized stage directions. Molly’s soliloquy at the end of the book, which lacks punctuation, is also better heard, as I was able to do when Eunice Wong performed it on stage in New York. RTÉ, Ireland’s national broadcaster, produced an audiobook of “Ulysses” in 1982 with a different actor for each character. You can link to the recording here.

We are not headed for a good place. The walls are closing in. We too are becoming outcasts. Novels such as “Ulysses,” as Dedalus says, provide “the eternal affirmation” of the human spirit. They remind us why we were put on this earth. They make us feel less alone. They sustain our souls.

-Chris Hedges

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